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I’m so excited. I wish Elon would go back to being neutral on politics, it would make this so much easier to wholeheartedly support.
by huytersd 3y ago
I’m so excited. I wish Elon would go back to being neutral on politics, it would make this so much easier to wholeheartedly support.
- hackernan9000 3y agoSupport the 13k employees and associated supply chain that do the real work.
- IshKebab 3y agoThat also do real work. I don't think it's fair to say what Elon does isn't real work or isn't important. I don't think many people would say SpaceX would be where it is today without him. The real answer is to simply accept that real people are not one dimensional characters. They have good points and bad points. You are perfectly free to appreciate the good points while disapproving of the bad ones. Maybe there's a limit for really bad people (Hitler etc.) where you just don't want them involved in society at all, but that clearly doesn't apply to Musk. Nothing he has done is outright evil.
- hackernan9000 3y agoTrue, but that level of nuance likely isn’t going to make contact with those that have staunch political views - it’s worth the reminder that any company is not the CEO.
- trollied 3y agoHe might be the CEO, but Gwynne Shotwell runs the business & runs it well.
- calderknight 3y agoAlso worth the reminder that Elon is not just the CEO
- mft_ 3y ago> that level of nuance likely isn’t going to make contact with those that have staunch political views Interesting; you appear to suggest that an interest in politics makes someone more stupid - in that they become incapable of appreciating a nuanced view of a topic. Is this what you mean? On the broader topic, the “it’s the workers that do the work not the CEO, man” point you made is often irrelevant to the argument it appears in, and amusingly (given it’s often levelled against him) is weakest in Musk’s case. When a CEO is just an interchangeable face at the top of an established company hierarchy, who has limited influence on the company for their tenure, it’s well taken. But in the case of SpaceX (definitely) and Tesla (probably) those companies likely wouldn’t exist at all (or wouldn’t exist in their current form) without the direct hands-on work and direction from Musk himself. Yes, he doesn’t construct or weld things himself, but that’s already obvious to any rational observer of the world; he employs many thousands for those and other roles, because that’s just how companies scale and operate.
- concordDance 3y ago> Interesting; you appear to suggest that an interest in politics makes someone more stupid - in that they become incapable of appreciating a nuanced view of a topic. Is this what you mean? Not who you're replying to, but I think there's very strong selection effe ts in play where those more likely to speak up with passion in public places like this are more likely to lack nuance in their political views. So it's mostly not that those with an interest in politics (even a strong interest) are less nuanced (though they probably are somewhat, as being bad at nuance makes political radicalization more likely), but that those with an interest but nuanced views will have a harder time actually bashing out a comment on the subject and will think it less likely they will be able to convince anyone (because its not a simple matter).
- hackernan9000 3y agoAlso worth noting that one can be strongly interested in politics (e.g. political scientist) and hold neutral policy views. So the comment was aimed at the poster with strong enough political views that they felt the need to post in this forum that their support for the launch was affected by it - where as most folks would not. In this case, it’s less about interest and more about behavior.
- matsemann 3y agoIf only I were like you, clever enough to have nuanced views.
- mpweiher 3y agoPretty much everybody knows that a company is not the CEO, and only people with staunch political views seem to think that everybody but themselves is so stupid as to not be capable of nuance and be in need of reminding. But people also know that CEOs tend to have a huge influence in the success or failure of a company, and founders have a not entirely negligible influence in the company existing in the first place.
- cyclecount 3y agoYou can’t be neutral on a moving train
- justinator 3y agoYes but can you be neutral on a train moving at the speed of light?!
- borissk 3y agoA train can never move at the speed of light (as it has mass) ^_^
- throwawaymusk 3y ago[flagged]
- TimJRobinson 3y agoYea his gift is assembling teams to solve technical problems - things that people already want but can't do yet. He sucks at solving social problems where it's unclear what people want.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> He sucks at solving social problems where it's unclear what people want. So do we all.
- butler14 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
- justapassenger 3y agoHis main gift is amazing fundraising capabilities. And people will disagree if he’ll do that by selling a compelling vision or lying.
- ryzvonusef 3y agoYou take the good with the bad. The same brain that is so pig-headed as to believe whatever $Conspiracy today, is also the brain that was pig-headed enough to think he could fund an EV and a Rocket company at the same time, when he had experience of none, during a recession. If he was reasonable minded, he would have realised the whole EV and Rocket thing is a stupid risk not worth taking and he would have invested his paypal money into something safe like all his fellow paypal mafia members who started VCs, and today we would never had heard of him except in esoteric terms, and he would have been sipping mai tai or whatever it is that VCs do when they are lazing around in their 3rd yatch. Like acc to his bio (mentioned somewhere in his 1st bio by ashlee vance) the man literally had an intervention with fellow rich white buddies that he's gonna go bankrupt, that's how stupid the idea was. to speak in explicit 4chan terms, that autist brain of his what created/funded this, and his stupid tweets are frankly a cheap price to pay for it (at least for me, I'm not american ;p)
- mrpopo 3y agoSo, if at some point he starts funding military spaceships that can shoot illegal migrants from space, do we still take the good with the bad, or do we denounce his behaviour?
- rizky05 3y ago[dead]
- zpeti 3y agoFirstly, that would be illegal, and government(s) could step in. Secondly, there are quite a few steps between having enough of woke twitter and buying it, which I'm pretty sure 20-30%, maybe even 40% of the population agrees with, and shooting illegal immigrants. I know the media try their best to portray these two as equivalents, but they're just not. Also keep in mind the biggest loser from the twitter acquisition is probably the establishment journalists, so they do have an axe to grind. Their views are not going to be objective on musk.
- 3y ago
- weberer 3y agoOr people can stop acting crazy when seeing someone who disagrees with them. I'm glad he broke the Twitter echo chamber, so now people have to confront the fact that regardless of whatever direction you lean, around half the country leans the other way. Maybe the polarization problem that's been happening since ~2012 can finally go away.
- kanbara 3y agoit’s only been getting worse because half the country believes freedom and women’s rights, and marriage equality shouldnt exist, and that we dont need fair elections, so i dont think twitter has really improved anything.
- concordDance 3y agoThat's a lot of heat and zero light you're contributing to this conversation. "But my political opponents are actually bad and believe bad things" is no novel insight, every single person here will have read something like it a hundred times before.
- mpweiher 3y agoThank you for illustrating weberer's point so perfectly in a direct response! (For reference: no, half the country doesn't believe these things)
- mavhc 3y agoThey're just fine voting for people who do believe those things
- mpweiher 3y agoEven that turns out to not be accurate. Just as inaccurate as saying half the country thinks that massacring Jews is an "act of liberation", though there are obviously quite a few people who believe that and those are located on the left. Yes, there are people on the fringes that believe those things...and both of these fringes are very dangerous. I happen to share the belief that the fringes on the right are more dangerous, and certainly presented the more immediate threat when Trump was in power. However, I understand those who believe that the left fringes are more dangerous, and they do have a case. Both fringes present an existential threat to our liberal democracies, as they both have repudiated those values, so maybe those differences are not really meaningful. Left and right are not the problem. The fringes are. Both of them. And they feed off each other, so they can only be defeated together. If you want to defeat the right fringe, you must defeat the left fringe. If you want to defeat the left fringe, you must defeat the right fringe.
- anonzzzies 3y agoI don't care about his stance on politics or anything, but I do consider his twitter crap a waste of his time at the cost of humanity as a whole. If he would focus on spacex (I don't care too much about tesla) and its spin-offs, the world would get better, faster. Even better would be more people like him, then it doesn't matter; we just don't have many for some reason.
- rapsey 3y agoDoubtful that they could move faster with him taking a more active role. Starship could have launched months before, but they have been waiting for FAA approval. It is not Elon's lack of attention holding them back.
- anonzzzies 3y agoSure, but he could be doing more spin-offs like Starlink. During the waiting. Instead of what he is doing with Twitter.
- rapsey 3y agoHe seems to be focusing on AI moreso than Twitter.
- komali2 3y agoI hope he doesn't. People like Elon can carry the flag of what many of us have been warning about when we point out that our systems often have single points of failures: often one man with, for example, the ability to literally end the world, and no actual safeguards to prevent it. Or, one man with billions of dollars of assets at his disposal, money which could be making people's lives better but is instead being used by that man to do things like buy his favorite website and ruin it. Or, the fact that that website is one of three or four which represent the backbone of our species' communicative ability, and that man can control which of our species' communications are seen. Whether it's a good or bad person at the helm, this is not how our systems should be designed or function. The more horrible the person, the more obvious this is.
- concordDance 3y ago> Or, the fact that that website is one of three or four which represent the backbone of our species' communicative ability, and that man can control which of our species' communications are seen. The problem here is the lack of properly open (and FOSS based!) popular communication channels. A committee or safety team can be even worse than one man.
- skrause 3y agoA successful SpaceX gives me hope that Elon Musk will eventually move to Mars for good, so it’s not hard to support it.
- MangoCoffee 3y agoit's stupid to wish a guy to be your ideal hero. hero is to be admired, not worshiped. you can admire what he accomplished. he ain't no God.
- coldpie 3y agoYeah. I used to be pretty excited about SpaceX stuff (remember those first re-usable booster landings?? amazing). But now it's impossible to separate that work from their CEO's bonkers conspiracy theory mongering and anti-trans, anti-democracy, and white supremacist views. So I mostly just ignore SpaceX news items now. It sucks. I hope SpaceX is able to dump him soon so they can get back to just being a cool company doing cool things.
- zigman1 3y agoyeah I find all of this pretty strange, because Musk was very much adored by the left leaning people before he started his cultural war. Around 2016-2017 he was still the cool guy even on Reddit. I find this whole political circus slightly unnecessary and I believe he got himself few doors closed by this.
- coldpie 3y agoIt's probably the single most high-profile example of the dangers of social media addiction in history. Guy fell in a deep social media hole around that time and in a few short years it's completely destroyed his reputation and seems to be affecting his personal mental health pretty massively.
- lupusreal 3y ago[dead]
- ecommerceguy 3y agoWhat exactly is anti-democracy? It sounds like to me you are actively trying to supress viewpoints you disagree with, and by extension decrease their voice and reach leading to suppressing their vote which is anti-democracy, no? I'm convinced this numb minded narrow viewed narrative is such a minority that it's proponents have a zeel to spew their misinformation every chance they can get.
- coldpie 3y ago> What exactly is anti-democracy? He promotes and supports the US politicians who architected and supported the January 6th attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, and who are continuing that work today to end democracy in the US.
- justinhj 3y agoWhy don’t we hear the same about Bezos and his Wapo or the dozens of tech CEOs and Hollywood stars and influencers that share the same views? Because people don’t want Elon to be neutral, they want him to be fully mainstream left or fully silent.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stainablesteel 3y agoits not him that's changed, its the medias portrayal of him